50% of Americans think 50% of Americans are wrong

I had no intention of embarrassing or insulting anyone, but I wanted to make a point. I asked people who the 15th president was. The few who answered said, “Lincoln.”

“No biggie” I replied, “but he was the 16th President. James Buchanan was the 15th.”

I asked them about the ramifications of the Dred Scot decision. Only 2 of 5 had heard of it.

I asked a different group about the Treaty of Versailles. No one was sure of it and one person offered that it was a cocktail.

Again, no biggie. I’m not trying to embarrass anyone and I completely understand that most people are more interested in how their kids are doing at school, where their stock portfolios stand, and how grandma is feeling. The history and minutia of politics is not as pressing and that’s as it should be; the business of living and raising a family is our priority.

…yet for some reason we think that, collectively, we are foreign policy experts, constitutional scholars and economic theorists. Why else would we see all of these polls that tell us how many Americans agree with the President’s policy in the Ukraine or how many Americans are in a fit over the federal budget or what their feelings are about the national debt?

I read that “58% of Americans polled believe that foreigners view President Obama as incompetent.”

So?

What relevance is possibly gained from a poll of the perception some Americans have of opinions overseas?

I saw another poll that said “Most Americans now disagree with Obama’s economic policies.”

So?

If I asked the 5 people around me, “What is the difference between the national debt and the deficit?” I’ll bet maybe 1 would know (I asked and 2 knew). Yet, we think that our majority opinion is equivalent to a school of economics.

Again, this is not about insulting anyone, it is about being realistic. I have a friend who sent me half a dozen links explaining why President Obama is the worst president in history. I explained that each one was from a conservative source and that I could produce an equal number with a differing opinion. In fact, I could find articles for, and against, every policy, every President has ever presided over.

I found it interesting that the same friend predicted that “Obama will go down as the worst President in history” –only 3 months after he took the oath of office. Nothing the President could have done at that point could have indicated any future results whatsoever. My friend is smart, but I assure you he isn’t clairvoyant; he simply found the evidence that he wanted to find from sources that he sought for that very evidence.

And we spin our own points of view into “information” that we share as if we are educating one another, and then polls reflect the percentages who have been convinced by the rhetoric. We all do this to varying degrees, left to right, but the past 6 years have created the most contentious divides in history, and we find ourselves in a political stalemate.

Most Democrats didn’t care for (even hated) the policies of President Bush, but they still came to negotiate at the end of the day. Some Democrats gave Bush his wars, even his poorly conceived educational plan and prescription drug programs.

Most Republicans loathed President Clinton, but both sides still came to the table because if anything was to get done, they had to.

Since the day President Obama took office, the policy of the Republican Party has been a 100%, lock step, obstructionist agenda to destroy him. The economy, national security, genuine health care concern, veteran’s benefits, all became irrelevant to their task of convincing the American people that everything he does will be something we cannot afford, even as he reduced deficit spending.

Republicans have successfully bankrolled that message in every medium and polls show us the result. Maybe it was because of the catastrophic economic collapse during the Bush administration and a foreign policy quagmire that the once reasonable Republican Party became frightened of obscurity. In a country where the demographic map was not changing in their favor, maybe they saw this as the best hand they had to play in order to regroup.

And when a man became President who unequivocally challenged the status quo their ideology is engineered to protect, maybe that was too much to bear.

The forum for our debates since 2008 became the explosion of the Internet where we no longer use objective journalism to investigate the truth (does objective journalism even exist anymore?), instead we find editorialists and polls to support what we’re looking for based on what we already thought.